Self-Destruction in The Worst Person in the World

It’s Oscar season, y’all!

Thinking blissfully about all the movies you still want to see.

That’s right, it’s the time when all dreams come true! A stirring Benedict Cumberbatch cowboy movie? Not one but two creative and well-directed movie musicals? Jared Leto isn’t getting recognized for his performance as Mario in House of Gucci? Anything can happen! The Green Knight got snubbed? Adam McKay made the most bizarre directive choices ever and still got a “Best Picture” nom? Branagh got a directing nom over Villeneuve? It’s truly the Wild West out here.

This year is particularly exciting because of how much last year seemed to come and go without much fanfare. In a year without open theatres, it was hard to get very invested in an award ceremony. I’m still slowly chipping away at the movies from last year. I’ve seen… two of the “Best Picture” nomination from last year’s Oscars. I am chipping very slowly. But it’s a new year and there are a lot of films to catch up on. In particular, it’s always a trip to catch up on the “International Picture” nominations. Like, Parasite was absolutely stellar, and though it didn’t get nominated that year, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is maybe the prettiest movie I’ve ever seen? And Drive My Car is able to do things that a lot of Western movies can’t simply by circumventing typical structure. The opening credits don’t drop until forty minutes in. Moving away from Western preconceptions of narrative and opens the door for a lot of compelling ideas told in very compelling ways.

Prepare to see all the same four stills anyone posts of this movie, because that's all that's available

High on my list this year has been The Worst Person in the World. I don’t remember quite what it was that put it in my mind, probably one of Karsten Runquist’s videos where he talked about what he had been watching. Just the visuals of it, the colour palette, the dream-like cinematography, was immediately compelling. I’d heard a couple of descriptions of it, and it carried a certain captivating essence. I’d watched theatres like a hawk, and the moment it opened in Eau Claire, I knew I needed to find the time to check it out. Sure enough, The Worst Person in the World absolutely crushed me. To the point where, like - I watched The Batman the day before and fully expected to spend my week writing about Robert Pattinson and how he brought to life a fantastic Bruce Wayne, and he did! And I do want to write about that! But I wasn’t going to know peace until I wrestled with my feelings about this movie and put it in proper writing.

The first run of this blog was a lot of recommendations. I started off doing basic reviews before more or less doing away with that formula in favour of promoting a new thing through the lens of old things. Things like watching all of the Spider-Man movies before No Way Home and talking about the way this newest adaption thinks about Peter Parker. I like writing this way – that’s basically what the article on The Batman will probably be. I like writing that way because it helps give a critical framework for something that really could boil down to “movie good, please watch.” I go back and read, say, my review for Ford v Ferrari and, like, it’s fine but it’s not particularly deep. Which is probably fair because Ford v Ferrari isn’t an exceptionally deep movie – but still. I like being able to engage with a movie on a deeper level when possible. But every once and a while, you need to just gush about something. Because sometimes a movie just sticks with you.

Smoking is unfortunately very cinematic

So, what exactly is The Worst Person in the World? I’ve seen some describe it as a rom-com, but it doesn’t feel quite romantic or comedic enough to really hit on that label. The Worst Person in the World is a story told in twelve chapters about Julie, a normal woman in her late twenties/early thirties, desperately looking for a place in life. We watch her push through about five different careers in as many minutes. She’s unsatisfied in life. She loves her boyfriend – or maybe she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to start a family – but maybe she does. Julie is stuck, but always forced into movement. Julie can’t get a break, but also isn’t making things any easier on herself. She’s brimming with life and excitement but carries a sullen melancholy. She feels ignored, feels unseen. On some level, she feels numb to the world around her. “I feel like a spectator in my own life,” she confesses, “like a supporting character in my own life.” Time spins on outside of her will, and all she wants is some semblance of control. In her desperate attempts to structure her life, Julie inevitably stumbles into mistakes.

Despite its simplicity, this is probably one of the least accessible movies I've talked about here, but also one of te most arresting.

When does intimacy become cheating? When should you settle down and be “stable” and when should you get up and run? When do your needs come before the needs of those around you? Julie’s life is one spent on the edge of self-destruction. If you feel asleep behind the wheel, you’ll do anything to wake up. She pursues anything and everything to make her feel alive, even if that hurts her and the people around her. Her friends and lovers care for her, but all their support can’t help her find herself. With no stability and no structure, all the love in the world can’t help her from waking up and feeling like the worst person in the world.

It's really hard to talk about this one in any depth because so much of it as about the vibe. None of the characters are exactly heroic, but there is an essence of reality to them, especially Julie in all her dimensions. 2021 was a year filled to the brim with uncertainty. Even now it’s hard to say with any clarity what the next few months will look like. I didn’t used to have an anxiety about turning 30, but between this, Inside, and tick… tick… BOOM, one can’t help but be cripplingly aware of the unstoppable passing of time and how every moment is a moment spent or wasted. It’s easy to be caught up in the life of someone similarly stuck in in their circumstances, someone able to run into the face of danger and do what feels right, even if the consequences are dire. It’s deeply cathartic to see someone throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. It’s a movie about the desire to stop time and just live in the moment. And if that brings loss, then you have to hope that from death comes rebirth.

Every time I see Annihilation I kind of just want to watch Annihilation again.

This movie made me think a lot, bizarrely, about Annihilation. The two movies really couldn’t be any more different in tone – one is a fun, grounded melancholic dramedy (with a handful of creative, brain-breaking sequences), the other is a twisty sci-fi thriller/horror. Both together, these movies capture something about the human condition, the tendency towards self-destruction. Annihilation fills its cast with people marching towards certain death as they head into the mysterious and alien Shimmer, not knowing what is inside. But in Annihilation the attitude towards self-destruction shifts as the characters grow to know more about the world of the Shimmer. Inside the enigmatic veil, everything shifts and is refracted. People can either shift with it, or resist in their own varying ways. Resistance often results in messy, if not violent, ends – but compliance isn’t that much prettier. Well, the transformations of Annihilation are often very pretty, but they are just as horrific as they are beautiful. If death brings new life, there’s no guarantee that new life is recognizable to us in the present. Annihilation constantly rides this line between the terrifying and the transcendent. In the end, there is something sacred found in the annihilation of the old. Facing one’s inner darkness is a path towards self-destruction that can make way for something better, something somehow more whole.

What Annihilation conveys through science fiction, I think The Worst Person in the World conveys through drama. Julie doesn’t pass through an alien shimmer, but she does go through a crucible of the self. She comes face to face with life and death, with the mortality of all things. “I always worried something would go wrong,” her boyfriend Aksel says, “But the things that went wrong were never what I worried about.” Sometimes life is cruel and unfair, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. But maybe it doesn’t need to. Julie feels constrained by the need to define everything, to put it all into parameters, and it’s only when she breaks free of that and is able to feel everything fully that she can ground herself. This process isn’t easy, and it may not always be particularly safe. But in the end, just maybe, all that hardship brings new life.

There's a very good reason why this is the scene this entire movie is advertised with

People can say what they want about the Oscars – they are definitely not perfect and in a big way they’re still a popularity contest. But if nothing else, I’m glad that this sort of ceremony exists to spotlight movies like this that may otherwise get swept under the rug. Movies like The Worst Person in the World are able to get under the skin and access a part of the human condition that is so essential. I couldn’t help but feel like this film ripped out my soul and showed it back to me on more than one occasion, there was something so finely precise about it. 1500 words later and I still don’t think I can enunciate just what this thing made me feel – but maybe that’s fine, too. It doesn’t all need to be put into words. And that’s the beauty of it.

But also, if Don’t Look Up gets “Best Original Screenplay” over this one, I will personally be throwing hands.